After the original story featuring Germany's first and only ever super hero group, D-Gruppe, "Revenge Of The Ice Queen" -written and pencilled by myself and inked and lettered by Ben Dilworth- in 1987, I set about getting more back-up strips for the comic since Bastei Verlag were interested and asked for more.
At the time I was acting as a comic creators agent and was getting 60+ packages a week and at one time 100+ per week (where are these "dedicated" comic creators now, heh?). A few showed promise.
So I sent out the guidelines. The artist would need to draw the strip -pencils and inks- and I had a letterer to do that work so no problem. I wrote the scripts and made it very clear they HAD to be stuck to.
Back came the responses. Out went the scripts. I waited. In four cases I had to totally reject the artists who had not drawn much but had sent me pages on how the story "should be written" and how name changes would work better. A certain Scottish writer...well, Nazi experimentation, culling the weak and adding Nazi rhetoric....no. And, yes, he got very fractious about that. As did the others.
The Deutscher Michael strip by John Erasmus (in the D-Gruppe books) was a case where I just wrote "you know the guidelines -do what you want" and he did. A lovely, full colour strip. The guy is a pro and you knew he was 100% reliable.
A man in Malta was sent the script for a strip featuring the character Wavell. I cannot remember his name. Seriously. But on the back of one of these pages I had scrawled in large letters "NEVER EVER AGAIN!!!!!" meh. Five exclamation marks seems a bit over the top but I do have vague bad memories.
I got, a very long time after the deadline, some very rough pencils on hole-punched paper which you can see below. I wrote back that, okay, late but we had some extra time and the layouts looked fine. I got, after a long delay (again), a letter stating this was his finished art and where the heck was the second script??
Now, I thought some pages must have gone missing in the post (kids, this was pre-scanning and email). So I copied the pages and explained "this is all I've received" to which I got the reply "Yes. Those are the finished pages!" and a demand for the second script.
Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep breath. I wrote back and explained -again- that everyone was doing a back-up strip featuring a character to show Bastei and if they said "yes then the other scripts would be sent out BUT I needed the finished art as he had said very clearly that he had no problem pencilling and inking the four pages.
I never heard from him again but just as I started trying to ink his badly photocopied pencil pages I heard Bastei were out -after Egmont purchased the company.
Iskander "Izzy" Islam was a zine artist who had drawn an Hardware special and I liked his style. Although it would have needed re-lettering I still love these Rotkappchen pages.
The problem is that Izzy used the thinnest paper (use of THE thinnest paper ever goes to Ben Dilworth!) and painted on it using water colours. The package was delivered mangled but I did emergency work on them which involved pasting them on to A3 cartridge paper (I think Daler Rowney). Had I not then these beuaties would have gone long ago.
Drawn in 1989 you can see how the colours have faded in places and how that last page (which I still think is out-standing) has suffered. Just plain scanning without much touching up has worked wonders -to think I was not going to scan them!
John Schiltz later worked on my pencils of other pages and I even ink coloured some but only one page survives! That said, being a black and white comics artist I still prefer the non-coloured pages!
Some other pages that "never made it" into a full comic are in the D-Gruppe books
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/hoopercomicsuk?searchTerms=d-gruppe.
This is comics history, folks -and I believe German blogger Subzero has pages I don't have. Hmm. Maybe Tales From The Kryptonian ought to post those pages?
Artwork (c)2015 Terry Hooper-Scharf/John Schiltz/Iskander (Izzy) Islam/?
At the time I was acting as a comic creators agent and was getting 60+ packages a week and at one time 100+ per week (where are these "dedicated" comic creators now, heh?). A few showed promise.
So I sent out the guidelines. The artist would need to draw the strip -pencils and inks- and I had a letterer to do that work so no problem. I wrote the scripts and made it very clear they HAD to be stuck to.
Back came the responses. Out went the scripts. I waited. In four cases I had to totally reject the artists who had not drawn much but had sent me pages on how the story "should be written" and how name changes would work better. A certain Scottish writer...well, Nazi experimentation, culling the weak and adding Nazi rhetoric....no. And, yes, he got very fractious about that. As did the others.
The Deutscher Michael strip by John Erasmus (in the D-Gruppe books) was a case where I just wrote "you know the guidelines -do what you want" and he did. A lovely, full colour strip. The guy is a pro and you knew he was 100% reliable.
A man in Malta was sent the script for a strip featuring the character Wavell. I cannot remember his name. Seriously. But on the back of one of these pages I had scrawled in large letters "NEVER EVER AGAIN!!!!!" meh. Five exclamation marks seems a bit over the top but I do have vague bad memories.
I got, a very long time after the deadline, some very rough pencils on hole-punched paper which you can see below. I wrote back that, okay, late but we had some extra time and the layouts looked fine. I got, after a long delay (again), a letter stating this was his finished art and where the heck was the second script??
Now, I thought some pages must have gone missing in the post (kids, this was pre-scanning and email). So I copied the pages and explained "this is all I've received" to which I got the reply "Yes. Those are the finished pages!" and a demand for the second script.
Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep breath. I wrote back and explained -again- that everyone was doing a back-up strip featuring a character to show Bastei and if they said "yes then the other scripts would be sent out BUT I needed the finished art as he had said very clearly that he had no problem pencilling and inking the four pages.
I never heard from him again but just as I started trying to ink his badly photocopied pencil pages I heard Bastei were out -after Egmont purchased the company.
The problem is that Izzy used the thinnest paper (use of THE thinnest paper ever goes to Ben Dilworth!) and painted on it using water colours. The package was delivered mangled but I did emergency work on them which involved pasting them on to A3 cartridge paper (I think Daler Rowney). Had I not then these beuaties would have gone long ago.
Drawn in 1989 you can see how the colours have faded in places and how that last page (which I still think is out-standing) has suffered. Just plain scanning without much touching up has worked wonders -to think I was not going to scan them!
John Schiltz later worked on my pencils of other pages and I even ink coloured some but only one page survives! That said, being a black and white comics artist I still prefer the non-coloured pages!
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/hoopercomicsuk?searchTerms=d-gruppe.
This is comics history, folks -and I believe German blogger Subzero has pages I don't have. Hmm. Maybe Tales From The Kryptonian ought to post those pages?
Artwork (c)2015 Terry Hooper-Scharf/John Schiltz/Iskander (Izzy) Islam/?
Are you calling me out ?
ReplyDeleteDamn right.
ReplyDeleteNothing going on in the UK so why not?
ReplyDeleteHappy memories... and it's strange, because I've never seen most of this art work. It just feels so nostalgic in a good way. Cheers, Terry. Off to a meeting. Pray for me ( that's a litle side joke ).
ReplyDeleteAhh. When you stray onto the path of Counter Actuality then what happened may not have happened or even been a glimpse into what should or could happen. You have seen it. You have not seen it. Could it be you are going to see it -but you have now. The balances between the Meridian and the Zenith are inter-changibly irreplacible. Or are they? I've NEVER been sectioned.
ReplyDeleteAs my friend and colleague in strip form , Potwas Particolumbus , once said to Thymus , " Never look back , you may find that your tail is missing ! " . P.S. I've not been sectioned either .
Delete